INTERLUDE IV

HOME AGAIN

My house didn't look a whole lot better on the Saturday morning I moved in again than it had two days earlier when a stream of students had helped to clear out the kitchen and adjacent pantry; fortunately the former is just inside the back door. The boys carted off all manner of empty cans, jars, and other items they deemed of potential worth, but the yard was, and over a week later, still remains a discouraging mess.

After dumping the assorted duffel bags, suitcases, daypacks, boxes, and other objects of conveyance that contain the principal items of my clothing, care, and comfort here, I strolled through the house to assay its content and condition. There were now only five beds instead of six, but surprisingly I found a pad and blankets on four of them; when I left only mine was so supplied, and I had bullied Mr. Chagga for several weeks to acquire even that. There are six blankets, two sets of sheets, provided a person can sleep between a pink one and a blue oneor if the procedure here is to sleep directly on the pad, four beds can be provisionedtwo pillowcases, and one modest pillow. Only one of the four pads, mine naturally, fits the bed frames, the others all being too big, and closer inspection of the blankets revealed that four are of rather modest dimensions. I have my own sheets and pillowcases, so all I require from government stores is a blanket and the one pillow, plus my bed and pad of course.

The house has been described before, but perhaps in the passage of many months since then, readers, like me, will find a review helpful. Its largest bedroom, which is the one I used before and will again, is in the northeast corner of the house and affords a splendid view across a few farms in the valley below to Mt. Meru. This room stays quite cool and is the quietest because of its remoteness from neighboring houses. I've added two tables, a bookcase, and two chairs to its sleeping facilities, and it's the room in which I do most of my reading and writing. Its condition was really not too bad, just extremely dirty, and only a few hours of hard work made it quite livable again.

The other two bedrooms, also situated along the east side of the house, are much smaller, and my only interest in them is to use the wardrobe that each contains. These are much too large to get through the bedroom doors, as another half–dozen of my students verified empirically one day, so they clearly were assembled in the rooms. I gave the wardrobe in the middle bedroom a thorough cleaning, perfunctorily swept the floor, and unpacked. My first day at home ended with my bedroom, except for the windows, and the middle wardrobe in good shape but the rest of the house still in filthy chaos.

I celebrated the Sabbath by promoting cleanliness above godliness, beginning in the pantry. Once clean this provided space for storing my empty boxes and bags, those few items left by the previous tenants that seemed to have some potential use, and the unpadded extra bed frame; my half–dozen assistants did require some engineering guidance a few days later to work this last object out of the bedroom and into the pantry. With the boxes and bags out of the sitting room, I was able to reorganize it. That was the only room in which I found a burned-out light bulb. When I came a year ago, I was surprised to find that eight of the ten interior sockets were empty. Since there are also ten doors in the house, each with a lock requiring its own key–and I was given two complete sets–I often think of the place as “the ten-fold way.” I had only enough remaining energy to clean niches in the kitchen and dining room so I could prepare and eat food with some sanitary safety, and then it was off to bed.

The school timetable was still tentative–one or two newly assigned teachers had not yet arrived–but my schedule was close to what I had requested, and by midweek it was exactly right: three streams each of form-five and form-six physics, each stream meeting for three double periods weekly. I have four eighty-minute classes daily, except on Friday when I have only two. The middle period, which precedes the tea break, is free, so I have about an hour in late morning for a snack, some tea, and a rest; I go to the house to enjoy this brief respite. I finish the week at 10:15 on Friday.

On that first Friday after a week of fulltime teaching, I was actually finished at 8:45 because my form-five students had not yet discovered the latest revision of the timetable. It was raining, which caused a postponement of my planned trip to town for household supplies, so I returned to the house. Tired from a very hard week of work, I stood for quite a time, with hands in pockets, looking across a filthy room and out a dirty window, wondering what on earth I was doing here. It was a moment of aloneness, a feeling of purposelessness, a sense of just wasting time until the school year finally ends. It was a mood I don't think I've experienced here before, certainly not since the end of training. There seemed to be only two alternatives: returning to bed, and I seriously doubted I could sleep until Monday morning, or resuming house cleaning. I chose the latter course and began with a dustup, I think the Brits call it, of my bedroom. From that room a hall runs to the middle of the house where it opens into the living and dining rooms. The two small bedrooms are on the hall's east side; on the west are a small window, just outside my bedroom door, and the two bathrooms. The house has six outside walls, not four, because the four rooms on the west don't extend as far north as do the five on the east; thus my bedroom is enclosed by three outside walls. So I continued by cleaning the hall, its window, and the six surrounding doors. Next I polished up the living room and did the dining room; there is no partition between them. Finally I once again collapsed for the night.

My original intention for Saturday, at least once Friday's trip was washed out, was to go downtown early for breakfast, then some shopping, and a midday return for more housecleaning. But I dillydallied in bed late enough to make that impractical, so I decided instead to have an early lunch in town after shopping. On the way down Linda stopped to offer a ride that I gladly accepted. She and her husband Mark, a missionary doctor to a nearby Maasai village, had just returned from their biennial three-month leave home, which is in Minnesota. We had much to discuss, including the devastating floods in the Midwest, but the ride was far too short.

The unexpected lift to town and some amazingly efficient shopping left me with an hour to kill before lunch, so I checked out the city for the first time in three or four months. It seemed unusually crowded, even for the tourist high season. The streets had not been improved, but they seemed more heavily trafficked. Storefronts remain as unkempt as usual, but behind the facades of several buildings are collections of quality merchandize not previously available. Main Street has a new European-style restaurant enticingly named “Sauvignon,” I was told, that I have yet to try, and another is soon to open near Victoria House as an adjunct to a delicatessen I frequent. The downtown deli remains a good source of bread and cheese–the mild, smoky, semisoft cheese I buy is labeled normal; I wonder what its antithesis is like–and I continue to enjoy meals at the Pizzeria, a main-street continental restaurant owned by a Swedish couple and managed by an East Indian man. This last has very good pastas and steaks by East African standards, and a decent Valpolicella they stock is helping to wean me from Kenyan pilsner. It was there I had lunch this day and continued the weaning process.

But the day was not over; there were three rooms on the west side still to clean. That side of the house is attached to the other a bit like a lean-to shed. Its roof is somewhat lower, and the inside ceiling is not covered; it's just rafters and channeled metal roof. The bottoms of the channels rest on a solid beam and provide a tight seal, but the tops do not, thus leaving a gap through which anything small can enter, including mossies and Nairobi flies, presumably. There is a 15-cm wide coarse screen at the top of the outside wall that collects dust, debris, and the mountain wind. The kitchen door is also screened, but it is covered with oblique wooden slats that deflect most of the wind and collect an amazing assortment of debris and dust. That deflected wind then comes screaming in under the poorly fitting door just as it does under the solid wood front door with such velocity that I sweep only during rare interludes of relative calm.

The north bathroom contains a toilet and sink. I knew that the porcelain top of the toilet I installed a year ago had been broken, but this was the first time I had seen its replacement, a cheap, ill-fitting object that falls to the floor when the toilet is touched. The original toilet was still in the pantry when I returned; neither Peter nor Mr. Chagga had removed it as each had promised a year before that he would. My boys pitched it into the yard along with everything else that first Thursday, and I wondered then how I could dispose of it. I needn't have wasted my thoughts; it was liberated before Friday's sunrise. In some regards East Africa is extremely efficient. On this day I almost retched while removing the slime, dirt, and excrement from the toilet, but fortunately the antiseptic cleanser I had acquired a year before was still effective and good smelling, even if its plastic dispenser-top had developed a grievous crack. The room became decent surprisingly quickly.

The other bathroom contains a sink and the shower. The latter did not dispense water a year ago, and it still doesn't, but even if it did, it would be too cold for comfort anyway. This room has always smelled a bit swampy to me, and now it was even worse. But it too yielded readily to some scrubbing, and although the odor was only slightly diminished, the appearance was vastly improved. Its population of small flies, a problem for which I've so far found no solution, seemed much increased, however. And there ended the first full week back on the hill.

The second Sabbath started slowly, but by midmorning the warm sunshine attracted me to the windows. Part of the motivation came, I think, from observing a flock of yellow white-eyes, a very diminutive bird whose name is an apt description, busily at work in the hedge that separates the kitchen side of the house from the road. I continued totally to ignore the two small bedrooms, so there were only the windows in the other three rooms on the east side to do. On the inside the work was quite easy, but the outside panes required lots of water, so I attacked them clad only in sandals and a pair of swimming trunks; I had carefully saved this work for a time when all of my neighbors were away at church. I finished the last ones, those looking out over the front porch–the entrance is between the living and dining rooms–between bites of lunch. They seemed so sparkling, compared to what they had been, despite their obvious need for a second washing to eliminate streaks and clean up missed areas, that I optimistically elected to clean the west windows as well.

That work went quite smoothly, both inside and out, until I came to the very last room, the kitchen. This was in bad shape when I arrived, and since I had barely touched it, the entire room was still a mess. The gas cooker was especially filthy, so I began by cleaning what outside surfaces it still has–when Mr. Chagga finally delivered it to me last year, it arrived without a back or oven door, with an empty gas tank, and with a defective hose to connect the two cripples. I replaced the hose but didn't get around to refilling the tank before vacating the premises at the end of the term. I noticed now that the tank was still, or perhaps once again, empty. When I opened the cover of the cooker, I was so disgusted at the mess inside that I pushed the superficially clean unit and its empty tank into a far corner, permanently. When the electric power is off, I won't cook. As Mr. Mtui had warned me, the English lads should not have left home without their mothers.

Cleaning the rest of the kitchen was routine, and then it was time for the windows. They were so dirty as to appear nearly opaque, and I should have realized at the beginning that it was not wind-driven dirt plastered to them during a driving rainstorm, but I didn't. I first began to suspect the truth when I returned inside after wiping off the superficial dust and cobwebs outside. All the windows in the house are barred on the inside with horizontal metal rods spaced at 15-cm intervals. Some are hinged at the top and can be opened inward; on the east side these also have screens that are very useful against mosquitoes when hot weather requires opening the windows at night, but oh my do they attract dust and debris. On the west side, however, except for the hall window, there are no screens, presumably because of the ventilation openings at the top of the outside walls of those four rooms.

The first kitchen window yielded to my efforts surprisingly quickly, but the second most definitely did not; I was sweating, banging my knuckles on the rods, and making little progress, when I finally realized that both sides of this center window were splattered with the same material–grease. Lard is commonly used here for frying, and the two boys had evidently used plenty, and with the window open. I did what I could and moved on to the last window. Even the metal rods were lard-encrusted here, and all I could do was soak my washrag in the hottest water my hands could tolerate and melt what little would come off.

Twice I stopped to rest and to consider giving up the whole venture–Ilboru, the Peace Corps, East Africa itself. I had already made reservations at the Norfolk for the next Sunday, and perhaps Mountain Travel would still have an opening on its Kenya walking safari beginning just a few days after that. It was tempting, very tempting, but after each pause I returned to throw more hot water at the window. Finally, my arms limp with exhaustion, I decided it was clean enough; there isn't much to see to the southwest anyway.

While relaxing a little later on the front steps, I heard the raucous cries and flapping wings of big birds, and looking up into the large tree nearby, I saw a dreaded sight, another pair of crowned hornbills. They fluttered down to lower limbs, and one eventually flew over the house, but neither was drawn to its reflection in my newly sparkling windows.

Things have changed in my neighborhood, however. The man who lived alone in his half of the house next door has been joined by his son, a toddler who was reportedly dumped on his parents by his ex-wife, so there's a bit of noise and lots of crying nearby. The child is tended by his uncle, barely a teenager himself, whose shrill monotonous whistling is reminiscent of a hornbill shriek. But like many African boys I've seen, he carries a slingshot, and I've observed more than once that he knows how to use it.

So, hornbills, this time I'm ready.

W. Vance Johnson

29 Aug 93